For speed of communications and cost effectiveness, individuals, businesses, and other organizations frequently exchange electronic data through e-mail, the Internet, and other networks and systems. Often this data comprises electronic requests for information from businesses. To compete effectively in the marketplace, businesses that must compose electronic responses to such electronic requests must process a large number of these transactions quickly.
For example, insurance companies may receive electronic requests comprising documents in compliance with the following standards:                HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act)—for requests about health insurance coverage for a patient's treatment by a health provider; and        ACORD (Association for Cooperative Operations Research and Development)—for requests about automobile and personal insurance coverage for a client.        
Typically, insurance companies or their representatives use software applications to process these requests automatically, completing each step independently in a required linear sequence, and then compose electronic responses to these requests and send the responses to the requesting parties.
Example of a HIPAA Request and Response
For example, in the health insurance industry, a health care provider, such as a doctor's office or hospital, may send an electronic request for insurance coverage, for a patient who needs treatment, to an insurance company. The request may be an ANSI (American National Standards Institute) 270 document in compliance with HIPAA standards. The insurance company receives the request over a network such as the Internet and then employs an application to process the request to determine the patient's eligibility for coverage and the patient's exact benefits before sending an ANSI 271 response to the health care provider. As shown in FIG. 1, before a response can be sent this processing requires a number of actions to be performed in a set sequence, such as the following:                Validating the request 610.                    The application determines whether the request is a readable ANSI 270 document that is in the correct format and contains meaningful data.                        Decomposing the information in the request 620.                    The processing application obtains the data contained in the request from the appropriate fields.                        Fetching response data 630.                    The application uses the data obtained from the request to determine the patient's eligibility for the treatment and the patient's exact benefits coverage.                        Composing the response 640.                    The application composes an ANSI 271 response to the request, containing the appropriate information.                        Validating the response 650.                    The application determines that the response that has been assembled is a readable ANSI 271 document that is in the correct format and contains meaningful data.                        
Linear processing of electronic requests, such as in the example given above, may proceed quickly enough to be satisfactory for an individual transaction. But businesses often must process many thousands of requests in short time periods, so that the processing time for such transactions adds up substantially and can cause delays unacceptable to customers and employees. For example, some businesses process 102 or more requests per second, amounting to 367,200 requests per hour. Moreover, delays because of errors located at any step in the process may cause significant bottlenecks that further reduce productivity and increase business costs.
To compensate for such problems with processing requests, businesses often employ larger and more capable computers or combinations of linked computers to decrease processing time, which are expensive solutions.
Therefore, there is a need for a system and method for automatically composing electronic responses to electronic requests that decreases processing time and reduces potential bottlenecks.